Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) systems are known in the art. As illustrated in FIG. 1, with the NUMA architecture, a single system 101 is divided into several nodes 102, where each node is a grouping of one or more central processing units (CPU) 103 and some local memory 104. Memory access from a CPU in one NUMA node to memory in another NUMA node, i.e., a remote memory access, usually incurs a high penalty. The actual cost of a remote memory access varies depending on the hardware, but typically ranges from about 40% to 300% higher than local memory accesses. The operating system will try to ensure that most memory accesses from a single thread or process will be local. However, for software systems that have many threads or processes, and where memory is shared between different threads or processes, the operating system alone is not able to optimally distribute the threads, processes, and memory. Thus, a typical database server, for example, running on a NUMA system will suffer from making frequent remote memory accesses.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a method and system for improving memory access patterns of software systems on NUMA systems. Before the initialization of a software system, the method and system should create a policy for the binding of threads, processes, and memory objects to NUMA nodes such that memory access is optimized or significantly improved. The present invention addresses such a need.